So what's your story? Meet Meograph

Three anecdotes about Misha Leybovich, founder of Meograph:

1. At the age of 8, he read Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, and from then he began to think about and imagine the connection between space and time, and the relationship between them.
2. In his past, he was a management consultant, and in his work he had to find connections between tales of coincidence and hard data.
3. Over the course of his life, Misha traveled extensively, and he always sought the easiest way of documenting his trip and telling his story.

These three things, claims Leybovich, led him to develop a simple, interactive tool for telling a story. Meograph is a digital tool for creating stories with the aid of pictures, videos, and the story itself (with a recording of the user narrating the story). Also, the tool makes it possible to locate the story in time and space, by means of a timeline and a Google map. This provides a response to the needs of writers, educators, and anyone else interested in sharing his or her story.

Currently, the Meograph tool can only be used with these web browsers: Google Chrome, Safari, and Mozilla (Firefox). However, the stories can be displayed on any browser. The tool recognizes street names in Hebrew; it also allows the stories to be written in Hebrew, casino online but the text is still left-justified. This does not interfere with the overall ability to create a meaningful story since, in any event, much of the story is created through the inclusion of multimedia elements.

The process of creating a Meograph requires planning, thinking about the process of constructing the story, looking for information on the web, writing and summarizing, distinguishing between the significant and the trivial, and narrating the story. There are potentially numerous educational uses: students could create stories in subjects such as history, civics, literature (here the stories could be purely fictional), or in the preparation of family history assignments. Meograph has a page with examples for its use in education. The following is an example of a story on the rise and fall of Rome:

The creation of a shared collection of stories in Hebrew, on various study topics, could lead to more interesting, experiential learning, for both teachers and students. Also, the use of a variety of input channels, in particular the timeline and the map, allows processes to be explained and thus can lead to more meaningful learning.

How to create a Meograph:

_______________________________________________________________

By Ran Magen